A joint project of Kid Knex and Playscool, the company releasing Tinkertoy plastic building kits. 2 wonderful sets combined in one box. From Kid Knex, the sets got flexible rods, shaped parts, eyes, and characters. From Tinkertoy – rings, adapters, sticks, blades. They released several sets – like Transit, Vehicles, Animals, Circus, and Pink. ATTENTION: Compatibility has some restrictions, for example, Tinkertoy sticks cannot connect to Kid Knex stars, there are no hard Kid Knex sticks in this construction set (we have Pink set). There are only flexible rods that fit well with the holes in the Tinkertoy parts. You can use this constructor together with Superstructs sets.
500 piece Zoob set is classic in all possible ways. It has those typical Zoob pieces with balls and sockets, but no extra pieces. This is a great set if you are interested in Zoob building. It’s more than enough for big and complex crafts. The photo shows all the pieces of this set and the baseplates (round red pieces).
Back in 1997, inventor Michael Grey introduced Zoob, a toy inspired by the science of motion and organism development. Zoob represents an acronym for Zoology, Ontology, Ontogeny, and Botany. Each set has rod-like pieces with joint balls and sockets on their ends. Each of these balls has small bumps on its surface, so the joints can both move and stay in a certain position if you need them to.
This innovative toy features a ball and socket connection system, mimicking the natural movement and design found in people, animals, and machines. With just five basic shapes, Zoob offers 20 different ways to connect them together.
Zoob building sets have won awards because they’re different from regular building blocks. They use plastic pieces that snap together, like gears and joints, to build all kinds of objects, limited only by your imagination. After you build something with Zoob, you can actually play with it – the pieces were designed to move after being assembled, so you can have fun with the toys you create.
Zoobs are great for helping children improve their fine motor skills. The pieces are small enough to easily manipulate and put them together. But they’re not too tiny like some other toys, so it’s easier for kids who find small objects tricky.
Peek-A-Blocks are cubes for kids by Fisher Price brand. A side of the cube is 2 inches. Our middle daughter got these cubes first at a respectable age of 2 years old. We bought her cubes with different sounds – rattles, bells and other noisemakers. And then we got other options. There are cubes of different themes – animals, vehicles, the alphabet. Cubes are usually transparent, for example, you can see insides of cube with an animal from 5 sides.
There are also little attractions – a dog wags its tail when you shake a cube, beads jump around a pig, ducklings spin around with their mother. In general, for kids this is not only the very first building material, but also an entertaining toy.
Usually there are 6 cubes in a set. To further fascinate your child with these set, there are also various tables, sorters and other devices for playing with cubes. For this purpose, we have a musical giraffe. But kids no longer put the cubes in it, they use small cars.
The photo shows our very favorite cubes. For example, a chicken squeaks when you press a button on top and at the same time hides behind a descending shell. The kids really like touching the strings and ribbons on the cubes. Our absolute favourite cubes are those with a bell and a metal ball. And the youngest loves a cube with 3 carrots spinning in it.
Then manufacturers made the cubes with an additional “brush” on 2 sides of the part; now you can connect them to each other and attached to the same bristly surface. I really liked the idea of looking at an object through a transparent wall, and for my growing younger daughters I made noisy jars that they can use to make noise. You can use the cubes to build simple towers and marvel at the contents.
Back in 1997, inventor Michael Grey introduced Zoob, a toy inspired by the science of motion and organism development. Zoob represents an acronym for Zoology, Ontology, Ontogeny, and Botany. Each set has rod-like pieces with joint balls and sockets on their ends. Each of these balls has small bumps on its surface, so the joints can both move and stay in a certain position if you need them to.
This innovative toy features a ball and socket connection system, mimicking the natural movement and design found in people, animals, and machines. With just five basic shapes, Zoob offers 20 different ways to connect them together.
Zoob building sets have won awards because they’re different from regular building blocks. They use plastic pieces that snap together, like gears and joints, to build all kinds of objects, limited only by your imagination. After you build something with Zoob, you can actually play with it – the pieces were designed to move after being assembled, so you can have fun with the toys you create.
Zoobs are great for helping children improve their fine motor skills. The pieces are small enough to easily manipulate and put them together, but they’re not too tiny like some other toys, so it’s easier for kids who find small objects tricky.
We store Taikon in a container with removable partitions, we found it in the screws-and-grooves store department. Natalie once wrote in one of her reviews that you can find containers like this in the fishermen store. You can put an instruction book on the hinged lid, like on a music stand.
Building straws, also known as building tubes, are a popular type of construction set with unique possibilities. They allow you to create silhouettes and contours of different objects and animals. All crafts from these sets can bend and move, so kids can actually play with their creations.
Instead of blocks, these sets have flexible plastic tubes, that look and act like soft cocktail straws. They can bend in any way and hold any position you want. The tubes usually attach to each other with special plastic connectors. The connectors can look and work differently in the different sets, but there are always many ways the straws can connect. The most common version is hard pins that go inside the straw’s hollow end, fixing it in place. Some connectors of this type have only one or two pins, some may have eight or ten. They also can have different forms, like sharp corners or straight rods. However, this connection type usually means that you can connect the straws only with their ends, and never with their middles.
These straws have great building potential, but, sadly, they can’t hold their shape under pressure (unlike, say, block towers that can hold something on their top). The straws’ building possibilities also depend on how long they are.
Just Taikon scissors by Alesya. Ironically, we used the real scissors to cut these tubes.
Building straws, also known as building tubes, are a popular type of construction set with unique possibilities. They allow you to create silhouettes and contours of different objects and animals. All crafts from these sets can bend and move, so kids can actually play with their creations.
Instead of blocks, these sets have flexible plastic tubes, that look and act like soft cocktail straws. They can bend in any way and hold any position you want. The tubes usually attach to each other with special plastic connectors. The connectors can look and work differently in the different sets, but there are always many ways the straws can connect. The most common version is hard pins that go inside the straw’s hollow end, fixing it in place. Some connectors of this type have only one or two pins, some may have eight or ten. They also can have different forms, like sharp corners or straight rods. However, this connection type usually means that you can connect the straws only with their ends, and never with their middles.
These straws have great building potential, but, sadly, they can’t hold their shape under pressure (unlike, say, block towers that can hold something on their top). The straws’ building possibilities also depend on how long they are.
Before we had time to play enough with roofs and SmartMax panels. We built houses, and towers, and fortresses with slopes, and playgrounds with slides, and garages with parking lots. And SmartMax has already prepared new kits for girls. And as our family experience has shown, boys also love to build houses and flower beds. In the new set there are new panels with a round hole and shutters! They are double-sided or one-sided, a ndcan be opened left and right, and up, as in the attic window. Or you can make a hatch, for example, in the floor. Of course, our favorite are the roofs, and new super-long rods. And a couple of colors were added. In general, at first glance, this is a very worthy set, both as starter, for trial, and as additional set.
We bought 2 large sets at once – Flower Palace and another set with 2 slides (Basic Stunt) for a full-fledged game of 4 younger children 2-6-8-10 years old. They have been playing for almost a year with great pleasure and growing interest. We plan to increase the number of details and interesting elements, especially since SmartMax released some attractive new products recently.
A big tiara for a small girl. Another Zoob Junior craft.
Back in 1997, inventor Michael Grey introduced Zoob, a toy inspired by the science of motion and organism development. Zoob represents an acronym for Zoology, Ontology, Ontogeny, and Botany. Each set has rod-like pieces with joint balls and sockets on their ends. Each of these balls has small bumps on its surface, so the joints can both move and stay in a certain position if you need them to.
This innovative toy features a ball and socket connection system, mimicking the natural movement and design found in people, animals, and machines. With just five basic shapes, Zoob offers 20 different ways to connect them together.
Zoob building sets have won awards because they’re different from regular building blocks. They use plastic pieces that snap together, like gears and joints, to build all kinds of objects, limited only by your imagination. After you build something with Zoob or Zoob Junior, you can actually play with it – the pieces were designed to move after being assembled, so you can have fun with the toys you create.
Zoobs are great for helping children improve their fine motor skills. The pieces are small enough to easily manipulate and put them together, but they’re not too tiny like some other toys, so it’s easier for kids who find small objects tricky.
We bought a set from the new Geomag Kor series out of pure curiosity and even with a slight sense of pessimism, and did not expect that it would be so interesting to play with. And most importantly – everything revolves in the literal sense around one ball.
ATTENTION! Guard the ball like it’s an apple of your eye – the constructor does not work without it!!! A shiny ball is a very attractive thing for younger brothers and sisters.
And one more thing – additional elements fit very tightly into the holes of the covers. So I recommend to attach them first them to the cover, and then attach the cover to the magnetic segment. Otherwise, with strong pressure, you can displace the magnetic segments and disrupt or destroy the constructed object. The lids also fit tightly to the magnetic segments, and sometimes they are also difficult to remove. By the way, the lids themselves can be decorative elements, you can insert them into the opening of other lids.
